A Groundbreaking Survey on What Kindness Means to Kids CONTACT For questions, please contact Dr. Oliver Scott Curry, Chief Science Officer, Kindness.org oliver @ kindness.org or Adam St. Bernard Jacobs, Director of Development and Communications, The National School Climate Center at Ramapo for Children, ajacobs @ ramapoforchildren.org. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Kid Kindbase Launches, Surveying […]
Category: News

PCA & The National School Climate Center Launch the Athletes with Courage Program
PCA and The National School Climate Center Launch the Athletes with Courage Program With support from The Choose Kindness Project, the program centers around student-athlete voices and leadership. (January 12, 2023) – Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) and The National School Climate Center (NSCC) at Ramapo for Children together have launched the Athletes with Courage (AC) program […]

NSCC Announced As Founding Member of The Choose Kindness Alliance
The National School Climate Center at Ramapo NYC is excited to share that we are joining 20+ other organizations as part of the Choose Kindness Project. Supported by ABC, ESPN and the Walton Family Foundation.The Choose Kindness Project is dedicated to inspiring a more inclusive world where all young people feel empowered to be themselves and […]

The First 100 Days of School Climate
Ramapo NYC hosted a webinar on Thursday, August 25, 2022 for our back-to-school webinar on school climate essentials in the first 100 days of school. The conversation covered how to build community in schools, improving staff retention, mental health and school safety, and social-emotional learning. Watch the webinar by clicking on the video below. […]

A Virtual Conversation: Healing Centered Engagement
A Virtual Conversation: Healing Centered Engagement On Friday, January 21st. 2022, Executive Director of Ramapo NYC, Sabrina Evans-Ellis, joined Dr. Shawn Ginwright to discuss Healing Centered Engagement, his new book The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Remaining Ourselves, and answering a live Q&A. We invite you to listen to the recording above. Below, we share some […]

Shawn Ginwright and Sabrina Evans-Ellis in Discussion on Healing Centered Engagement: Webinar
For Immediate Release: Shawn Ginwright and Sabrina Evans-Ellis in Discussion on Healing Centered Engagement: Webinar New York, NY. — January 13, 2022 — Ramapo NYC (representing the recent mergers of Ramapo for Children, the Youth Development Institute, and the National School Climate Center) announced today that the organization will host an upcoming webinar entitled […]

What’s Next? Creating a Vision for Reopening Schools Webinar
What’s Next? Creating a Vision for Reopening Schools As schools reopen across the country, many parents, students, and educators are experiencing a shared sense of anxiety, uncertainty, and a loss for the routines they built during a year of remote learning. However, the pandemic provides an opportunity to identify traditional methods that work and leave […]

#StopHate Campaign from Boy Meets Girl Inc. and In Kidz Co.
The National School Climate Center at Ramapo for Children is excited to be part of the #StopHate campaign from Boy Meets Girl Inc. and In Kidz Co. The #StopHate campaign was created in response to the growing anxiety many of us feel about the state of our country. Kids and adults are looking for ways […]

New ‘School Climate Playbook’ Serves to Guide Policymakers in Strengthening School Climates
The Aspen Institute Education & Society Program and ExcelinEd released a guide titled Conditions for Student Success: A Policymakers’ School Climate Playbook. The guide outlines 12 recommendations linked to existing state policy examples policymakers can use to build a comprehensive, coherent state-wide approach for improving school climate and student success. Keep reading […]

School Climate Increasingly Recognized as Essential Factor for Student Success
School Climate is the way the school environment functions to nurture students’ physical, mental, and emotional well-being. When a school community has a positive climate, it will experience a stronger sense of community, higher student and family engagement, and greater student academic achievement. Increasingly, schools across the country are coming to understand that for students to excel academically, they must […]

Learn Promising Practices from 6 Diverse Districts and Key Insights from Education Leaders in the Field
NSCC and Facebook for Education hosted the Connecting Communities of Courage Summit, where students and education professionals gathered to understand and address the most pressing needs of schools across the country. Click to read our report. After the summit, NSCC identified the core themes of the day, and traveled across the nation to visit and study six school […]

Pursuing Social and Emotional Development Through a Racial Equity Lens
The Aspen Institute Education & Society Program released a new brief – Pursuing Social and Emotional Development Through a Racial Equity Lens: A Call to Action. Developed with input from a broad cross-section of education practitioners and scholars, this framework is intended to help policymakers, practitioners and communities as they work to integrate the culturally […]
Partnering with Parents – Lessons from the Pandemic
The pandemic has reshaped parenting. While online and hybrid engagement certainly has posed challenges to families, there are more positive outcomes than we imagined, namely the paradigm shift of“parents as partners”. There has been an attitude shift towards engaging families in a child’s education, a shift from believing that parents have little to do with […]

The Symbiotic Relationship between SEL and School Climate
The Symbiotic Relationship between SEL and School Climate Susan Zelinski, Manager of Research and Evaluation at NSCC at RFC Christian Villenas, Senior Director of Research, Evaluation, and Measurement at NSCC at RFC Today is International Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Day. On this day, we are a nation reeling from several crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, […]

Call for Action to Prevent Gun Violence in the U.S. Released February 28, 2018
An interdisciplinary group of 19 school violence experts developed a joint statement endorsed by NSCC, which outlines a public health approach to protect students and adults from gun violence. This statement identifies an 8-point plan involving three levels of prevention, including a recommendation for a national requirement that all schools assess school climate and maintain […]

New Brief Links School Climate and SEL
For a long time, social emotional learning and school climate have been seen as two separate fields, but now researchers and practitioners recognize that both benefit each other and are necessary to building healthy schools. School Climate and Social Emotional Learning: The Integration of Two Approaches issue brief, created by The Pennsylvania State University with […]

ESSA Accountability Plans Offer K-12 Companies Key Primers on State Needs
All states and the District of Columbia have now submitted their accountability plans for the Every Student Succeeds Act—though not all have received approval from the U.S. Department of Education. Those policy blueprints offer K-12 providers specifics on the states’ emerging demands for products and services—demands that companies must be ready to meet. Keep reading […]
Shenandoah Valley student speaks of school climate initiative
“School climate refers to the quality and character of school life. It is based on people’s experiences of school and reflects norms, goals, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning practices, and organizational structures,” according to the state Department of Education website. […]

Shenandoah Valley student speaks of school climate initiative
“School climate refers to the quality and character of school life. It is based on people’s experiences of school and reflects norms, goals, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning practices, and organizational structures,” according to the state Department of Education website. Keep reading […]

An overlooked part of fixing school discipline policies: reducing fear
Ramapo Trainer Hannah Miller published an article in Chalkbeat New York on zero tolerance policies in schools! Hannah talks about seeing zero tolerance implemented on the ground and argues for viewing difficult behaviors as a form of communication, instead of uniformly penalizing students. “Last month, I walked into a public high school in the […]